Strange title, I know. That’s pretty much the events that surround this weekend — first the big release of Apple’s new operating system, the “Leopard” brand of OS X; and secondly an update about our house.

Leopard

Along with a few other blokes, I picked up the new release of Leopard this past Friday and went through the mostly uneventful upgrade. Although the DVD verification step took forever — long enough to shave my head, take a shower, and do a few other things around the house [and yes, I really did do those things while waiting for the DVD to verify itself] — the process of upgrading wasn’t painful at all…at least at the start of things.

The features that Apple boasted about — Spaces, Time Machine, the new Finder, and a number of other features — are pretty nice. I do have to say, that with all the hype that has been going on apple.com over the past several months, I just wasn’t as impressed as I thought I might be.

Cover Flow
I’ve given Cover Flow a try and have to say that for photos, it’s nice. It’s a nice way to breeze through a voluminous array of photos to find the right one — probably the same for some other files as well. But what kinda trips me up about it is the file navigation below it. It’s the typical expand/contract, accordion-style directory structure browsing. Personally, I’ve come to like the paned method of sifting through deep layers of folders. It just seems to work quicker for me. I’d love to see them give you options of customizing the Cover Flow directory browsing. Give me more options. I like options.

In addition, Quick Look (a feature that allows you to browse your documents) ought to have a feature that allows you to “quick look” through a folder in Cover Flow. Currently it doesn’t offer that sort of feature.

The Desktop
…is pretty nice, but nothing dramatic has changed. I don’t really care for the fanned out display, especially when you have a ton of things to fan through — and you can’t. What’d be slick is being able to scroll through that fan with your mouse scroller ball. Can we say “feature request?”

Time Machine
Haven’t used it. Can’t imagine using it until it’s too late. But it’s enabled anyway.

Mail
I tried it in tandem with Gmail’s IMAP capability that they just announced and hated it. It labeled my deleted item instead of just deleting them or throwing them into the trash folder. Plus, I’ve become accustomed to doing things directly within Gmail and its way of displaying things. I can’t say that I’ll ever go back to using a traditional mail application since I’ve started using Gmail.

Because I have volumes of mail in my inbox (over 2000 messages), it was a burden to have Mail sync up with all that mail. Not to mention I just didn’t care for the interface within the conversation view of things. I much prefer Gmail’s way of formatting conversations, allowing me to expand and contract instances in a conversation, rather than having to do all this double-clicking nonsense. Sorry Mail lovers…I just have no love for it.

iChat
Ewww. After having used Adium for the past several months, I can’t imagine using iChat instead. The bubble formatting of discussions is annoying, and the interface isn’t all that customizable. I do like that they support Gtalk now, but until they open it up to Yahoo and MSN protocols AND give me some chat formatting options OTHER than the annoying bubbles, I’m sticking with Adium.

Spaces
A nice idea, and I’m glad they integrated it. However (why am I starting to sound like I didn’t care for the Leopard upgrade?), if I’m working in one space and I have an IM notification in another, I can’t get notified in any of my spaces except the one that has the IM client running in it. A small detail, I know, but a big enough deal. But the ease of customizing your various spaces is nice. I’ll give them props for that. But for now, I’m just not THAT big of a multi-tasker yet to justify the need for more than one desktop space…yet.

Safari
One word…Firefox. I use it and only use Safari if I have to.

I haven’t used Boot Camp or the parental controls yet, so I can’t speak to those things.

On the whole, Leopard’s nice and has a few nice features and changes, but I’m just not so sure that I’m going to rush right out the next time Apple comes out with an upgrade to the OS. Leopard is worth waiting for the next update release.

OH…and I’ll have you know that you have to re-set up your printers, and my M-Audio MIDIMAN USB MIDI device doesn’t work now for whatever reason. I tried the latest drivers and it’s not working.

House stuff

Just a quick update on our house situation…we’re taking it off the market because it just hasn’t been getting any action; and we want to pay off our 20% mortgage before buying again. The irony is that this weekend we’ve had three requests for showings… even AFTER telling the real estate company that we want to pull our house off the market.

Filed under: All Things Apple, Applications, General, Home Ownership
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To date, we’ve replaced quite a few things in our house—why should now be any exception, particularly while we’re trying to sell our place? Apparently the hot water heater decided that it was time to go as well. That will make it the fourth major appliance we’ve replaced in our home. The current tally of replaced items in our home:

• New toilet and pedestal sink in 2005
• New furnace in 2005
• New dishwasher in 2006
• New washing machine in 2006 (simultaneously repaired our dryer, too)

…and of course we’ll be adding Hot Water Heater to that list. I really didn’t want to replace anything else while we’ve got the house up for sale. Looks like I don’t have much of a choice.

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It was an early morning—6 bells rang, waking me out of my slumber to get up and get ready to pick Natalie up from work, so she could finish baking her apple pie for our morning walk-through guests. After she finished baking her pie and the kitchen filled with the pleasing aroma of cinnamon and baked apple, we made our way to Stillwater so Natalie could sleep at my parents’ place and I could roam downtown Stillwater and take pictures.

I had a few things working against me—caffeine from the coffee making my hands shake and the utterly intense wind. I would have brought my tripod, but it’s so much to lug around, that I settled for my monopod. I think out of the hundred photos I took, there were a tiny handful that I’d actually show to anyone; and of those only six that I would eventually put up onto my gallery. All six can be found in my Objects & Abstracts gallery; my favorites being Steps to Smooth, The Fly (which did require a bit of post processing to get the rich contrast in color), and Playground in Motion.

After we got home from my parents’ place—around 3 in the afternoon—we noticed the gale winds were blowing in West Saint Paul as well. Unfortunately, some of the shingles barely could hold on throughout the 60 mile per hour wind gusts we were getting.

So guess what I got to do… I went to Home Depot to buy a ladder (I didn’t own one) and I got to nail down the shingles so that we wouldn’t have any blatant leaks… for now. SO…. I get to call the insurance company tomorrow and have a person take a look and survey the damage.

The last thing I need is to re-shingle our home. I guess we’ll deal with that bridge when we get there.

Oh… and the showing? Well, there was no sign of anyone having dropped by. No Realtor cards on the counter, no one ate any of the pie that Natalie worked on, and none of the info sheets were taken. What’s the deal? I felt like my time was wasted, having to leave the house for a few hours (and all the preparations I had to take to get the house ready for showing). But regardless, we hope that we’ll get some more showings in the days and weeks to come.

Filed under: Home Ownership, Photography
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We got the call Friday morning—our first showing will be Sunday morning at 11:30 am. I’m sure you can then appreciate how I went into hyper-drive to finish up my list of outstanding tasks that I wanted to complete before our first showing. Let’s just say that I’ve pretty much been working all day, nearly non-stop to get it all done.

I still have a few minor things that aren’t that big of a deal, but most of the major stuff is done, including cleaning the garage, doing some touch-up painting here and there, getting our garden (particularly the front yard) presentable, sweep the patio area, deal with our yard waste, put recessed light fixture trim back in, install new blinds, and a few other things.

So, yeah, I’m exhausted. A few things left to do and then I’m headed to bed. It’s been a good day—I hope that our guests fall in love with our home and decide to put down an offer. I’m quite proud with our house and how much we’ve improved it. If I were in the market all over again for the first time, there’s no way I would pass up our house with how nice and livable we’ve made our little home.

Filed under: Home Improvement, Home Ownership
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MLS# 3372005

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I was thinking about the photos I took when we first moved in—even before I did ANY work on the house. I thought I had lost them all to the great accidental reformatting of my hard drive back in the summer of ‘05. Apparently I didn’t.

I found on my website (doh!) a web gallery that I put up of photos of every single room in our house (save for the garage) before we moved in:

http://www.michaeltangen.com/home/index.html

I think I’m going to go through and take “after” pictures of some of the better shots that I captured and do like the whole morphing thing. We really did come a long way with that house—a loooong way. In fact, just thinking about the bathroom’s condition before I renovated it gives me a gag reflex.

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…well, tomorrow morning it will be anyway. This evening we had our Realtor over to cover all the details about selling, checking area prices, and sign official papers to get the deal moving. Before he came by, we cleaned up the house real nice, staged it up for him, and took pictures of all the rooms and the exterior, which I handed off to him to put into the MLS system.

We’re listing our house for $164,900.00, which is a more than reasonable price to what other similar houses are going for in our area—in fact, we think our price is pretty competitive and priced to sell after doing our area market research.

Our house officially will enter the market tomorrow, our for sale sign will arrive sometime early next week, and the waiting begins. Granted, I’ve still got some stuff I need to do around the house before I’d be willing to say, “the house is yours”—small things like repair a screen, touch up paint here and there, clean the garage out, fertilize our lawn, etc. Just small stuff, nothing monumental.

Bob, our Realtor, commented on just how much work we’ve put into the house—new bathroom, new laminate flooring on the main level, new vinyl floor in the basement, new furnace, new dishwasher, new washer—this house is ready to sell and has quite a bit of appeal despite its modest size.

Some photos: (more…)

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It’s been a crazy/busy weekend at our household. With the clock ticking and our first meeting with our Realtor on Wednesday, this weekend was filled with home projects including cleaning up the yard, mowing the lawn for the first time this year, weeding the garden, and finishing up the bathroom. We still have a bunch of de-cluttering to do before Wednesday, so I might have to bug out of work early and get some of that stuff done. I know the basement and the garage will be no small undertaking—they’re both disasters right now.

I managed to squeeze in a little bit of photography time, during my wife’s prime sleeping time. I’m finding it a bit more difficult to come up with ideas for subjects as the area is just “too familiar” and I’m just so used to seeing things the way they are; that at a moment’s glance they seem too ordinary and not worth the exposure. But despite that minor dilemma, I’m at least considering which aperture to use, the appropriate shutter speed, and where to take my light meter reading from.

For part of my exercise, I shot entirely in black and white mode on my camera, which produced some fun results. However, once I brought the photos into both Adobe Bridge and Adobe Lightroom, they ever so rudely removed my black and white mode from the RAW file settings and set it back to color. WTF!?! I couldn’t find any preference settings anywhere, that indicated removing the camera’s RAW information upon import. Apparently I’m not the only one having the problem.

I know it’s not that difficult to move the saturation slider in Photoshop RAW editor or switch to Grayscale treatment in Lightroom, but that’s hardly the point. I would some day like to reach the point, where I can take great pictures that don’t need to be touched in Photoshop or Lightroom. Apparently Canon (as well as other manufacturers like Nikon) uses some undocumented data “forks” to store information like color modes or other artistic settings. And of course, the only way to bring the RAW files in and have them preserved correctly is to use the software Canon provided…and that isn’t going to happen. I simply cannot stand their software…it’s bulky and not all that great like Photoshop or Lightroom.

One user suggested shooting in RAW/JPG mode, where it captures both a RAW file and a JPG…but I’d rather not have to do that. It defeats the point of shooting RAW in the first place.

In other news…

Our first batch of CD’s are on their way to the radio stations; so with any bit of luck in tandem with all the hard work we’ve put into the CD, you may start to hear a single or two appear on some of the radio stations in the Midwest.

We sent out 109 CD’s this round to radio stations throughout Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, North and South Dakota, Illinois, and Michigan. Next round we’ll do the East Coast and eventually the West Coast and down into the South. So next week, start asking stations like 89.3 The Current (or your local indie-friendly radio station) to play some of the songs off our EP, particularly “Beauty Queen” or “Bomb”.

I’m pretty excited about the EP’s leaving my house and reaching the radio stations, but with things coming down to the wire with our home and needing to sell, like NOW, I’ve been too preoccupied with getting our house ready. Hopefully we can sell soon, so I can get that distraction out of the way before mid-summer.

Likewise, I’ve decided to put off school for a bit as well. I haven’t really had too much time to think about it, let alone to take as many photos as I’d like. (If only I could like not go to work but still get paid…) But that’s not happening.

Anyway, there’s my busy weekend in review. Busy week ahead with our Realtor coming over on Wednesday and getting the house ready…then of course the big beer shindig on Friday at Macalaster College, Cinco De Mayo on Saturday… busy busy busy.

Filed under: Home Ownership, Photography
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Tips from a weekend warrior on installing your own laminate flooring

Our existing wood floor was less than desirable—and we really didn’t have it in us to sand it down and refinish it, especially with two cats who need their freedom to roam about. In addition, I wasn’t up for the chemical smell nor the labor involved in sanding down the floor. So my wife and I decided that we’d do IKEA’s laminate flooring—it’s inexpensive (averaging $1.29 per square foot) and we’ve been told it’s both durable and easy to install. Don’t be too quick to believe everything you hear. Installing it wasn’t easy… at least at first.

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It’s been another busy weekend in the Tangen house. This weekend I spent most of my waking hours painting both the walls and trim of our living room and installing new window treatments to make the room look fabulous. We still have a lot of work yet ahead of us—in two weeks we’re installing a new laminate flooring that will span through the living room, to the kitchen, and into our “dining room.” And of course, we’re also ditching the old hand-me-down couch and love seat and going to pick up something nice from IKEA.

So as a little treat to myself for all the hard work, I’m lounging on the couch and watching the latest Bond movie with a tall glass of beer. Mmm.

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Filed under: General, Home Ownership
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